The Hinterlands (43 page)

“I hope we don't hit no big rocks,” I said to Noble as we dug the upper edge of the cut. I didn't want to slow down to drill and blast, or to carry water for fire and dousing. But all along the cut my shovel never hit a rock bigger than a mushmelon.

When the gangs got the surface of the right-of-way loosened up with picks they brought the barrows and sleds and started shoveling out the spoil. I figured they was maybe five hundred tons of dirt to be moved, and that they would carry it down to be used as fill in the low places. But they dumped the spoil right over the side of the mountain.

“Ain't you going to use the dirt as fill?” I said to Howard.

“Too far to carry,” he said.

“You'll kill the trees below,” I said. They was dumping the dirt on the great mess and tangle of trees and stumps already spilled down the mountainside.

“Ain't got time to carry dirt halfway to Greenville,” Howard said. “What do you want to build, a flower garden?”

“I'll tell Mr. Lance to put a stop to it,” I said.

“Tell Lance what you please,” Howard said.

But Mr. Lance was way off in Asheville that day, and by the time I seen him it was too late. Tons of spoil had been dumped over the side of the mountain, smothering bushes and bending saplings, covering a lot of the stumps and logs down there. The whole mountain begun to look like it had been hit by a landslide or flood.

Because we found no rocks to speak of, and because they didn't have to carry dirt but to the lower side of the cut, the work went faster than I expected. By early July the gangs had shoveled down twenty-five or thirty feet into the gap. Most of the dirt was bright red, but deep down it got yellow, and in the saddle of the gap itself it was gold. It looked like we had shoveled out half the mountain and throwed it on the trees below.

“You throwed a lot of North Carolina into South Carolina,” Lance said when he seen what we had done. “Maybe we should charge the Sandlappers.”

He was sweating from having to walk up to the cut from his buggy. He leaned on his cane and wiped his face with a silk handkerchief. “Richards,” he said, “you've done good.”

“I didn't mean for them to throw the dirt down on the trees,” I said.

“Won't hurt nothing,” he said. “Trees will always grow back.”

“Mr. Lance,” I said. “When will I get my pay?” I was staying at the Lewis house and I had not paid them any board. And I was courting your Grandma and wanted some good clothes. And I hadn't paid Noble a cent neither.

“When you finish the job, Richards,” Mr. Lance said. “You have a contract, boy. You're not working for wages anymore.”

That burned me up, that we would have to work all summer and not get a cent. And what would I say to Noble, that he had to sweat till Dog Days with no wages? Mr. Lance could say I had a contract, but I had never seen no piece of paper. We had just shook hands and agreed that I would lay out the cut.

“Of course, I can lend you some money if you're short,” Mr. Lance said, wiping his face again with the shiny handkerchief. I had heard Lance made a lot of his money by loaning to poor people at high interest. Rumor was he had took land from people that couldn't pay him back.

“I can get by,” I heard myself say, though I didn't know how I would do it, unless I borrowed some from Pa.

“You'll be finished by the end of Dog Days,” Mr. Lance said.

“If all goes well and we don't hit no rocks,” I said.

The deeper we dug, the more I expected to find rock. I had thought all mountains was rock inside, that that was what made
them stand up and last. I thought if you raked the dirt and trees off any mountain you would find the soil was just the rotted and crumbled outside of the rock. The rock was the bones of the mountain that give it its shape. But in the gap we dug down twenty-five, thirty feet, and except for a few boulders and veins of loosened quartz they was nothing but more dirt. It looked like we would finish early. By August I would have my money, and I wouldn't have to work with Howard and his convicts no more. I could talk to Miss Lewis about getting married.

People come from all around to inspect the cut, and said it was the biggest thing ever built in the mountains. The upper bank was almost forty feet high, and I had sloped it back to the trees on the lip of the cut. I knowed that when it rained the bank would wash a little. But they was a ditch on the inside to carry away runoff. The bank would grow up in weeds when another summer come. I thought about setting out little white pines there once the hot weather was over.

One Friday evening, right at the beginning of Dog Days, it commenced to rain. We'd had showers and thunderstorms all summer. You know how clouds coming in from South Carolina hit the Blue Ridge and dump their water on a hot evening. But the ground would dry out in the sun by the next day. Sometimes we worked right through the rain. When you're sweaty and dirty the rain feels good on your back. The drops run like cold little feet on your neck. A summer rain is clean as a bath if they ain't no lightning. But when it thundered on a hot day, we got away from the gap. Every tree on the ridge had been striped down its bark by a lightning hit. Lightning started walking around up there, we got away in a hurry.

At the beginning of Dog Days it come this slow, steady rain that went on all night, a she-rain people called it then. It's the long soft
rain that soaks the ground, that don't run off but sinks in and melts the dirt. Every day I expected it to stop, but it rained again. When they was a break, me and Noble walked the trail over to the cut and tried to work a little, but it was like shoveling cream and mush. The gangs stayed in their camp at the foot of the mountain. We was digging the highest, deepest part of the cut. Even though they was a break in the clouds when we started, it was raining again before I had filled a wheelbarr. The clouds moved in from the south and hung there like ghosts around the gap. Me and Noble walked back to the Lewis house.

You know how it gets in a wet summer. Soon they was mushrooms in the pastures and orchards. The roads was nothing but mire and water stood in every low place. The creek was a dirty spate. The woods smelled like mold and mildew. It seemed the ground was rotting and the woods was in darkness. It didn't look like the sun would ever shine again.

“We might as well go home,” Noble said when it kept raining the second week.

“The minute we get back to Cedar Mountain it will clear up,” I said. Of course, I spent every minute I could with Miss Lewis. When she wasn't helping her Ma run the place I set with her in the parlor while she sewed. And sometimes we set on the porch and eat watermelon while we watched it rain. Every time we went for a walk we got wet, but we didn't care. Her Ma scolded her for getting her shawl wet. Young people in love don't care what they do to pass the time. All they want is to be together. We sung at the organ at night. We could stand out in the rain and kiss and not ever notice the dampness. Tell the truth, I didn't mind not working them first days.

But Noble didn't have nothing to occupy him. “It ain't never going to stop,” he said.

“Let it rain,” I said.

Near the end of the second week I seen Mr. Howard come riding into the yard. I was setting on the porch with Miss Lewis drinking tea when he rode up all covered with a big black coat. I couldn't even tell who he was till he reached the hitching rail.

“Have you been to the cut?” he said.

“Not today I haven't,” I said.

“It might pay you to go look,” he said.

I got my coat and hat and me and Noble took the trail over to the gap. At first I couldn't tell what had happened. It was like the cut we had dug had disappeared. In its place was a pile of dirt and trees and roots. Muddy water was streaming out of the mess. The roadway was gone.

The high bank above the road had caved off in a slide. The mountain had melted and run like it was candle wax. It was like the dirt we had cut through bulged out and ruptured. The mountain had pulled away from itself in clots and gouts. Trees leaned over from the top, their roots sticking out in air. Wet weather springs had opened in the side of the spill and poured down on the soupy mush. All our summer's work was covered up.

And it come to me what Pa had said, about hoping we would hit some rock in the gap. They wasn't nothing to hold the mountain back when it got soaked. They wasn't no firmness, no strength inside the mountain, once rain started pouring on it. The raw dirt had turned to jelly, and then syrup.

“This mountain don't want no road across it,” Noble said. And I felt it was true. Here, at the highest point on the turnpike, it was like the mountain had decided to stop us. It was like the guts of the mountain had voided theirselves on our roadway. It seemed the mountain was cussing me for cutting through it. It had put a hex on the project, and was fouling over my work.

It did finally stop raining the next week, and Mr. Howard brought his gangs back up the mountain and we waded into the edge of the slide. First the stumps and trees had to be chopped out of the mud. And then we started shoveling and carrying the muck out of the way. Soon we was all covered with the paint and paste of the red mush. Only clean place was out in the woods, away from the road. My clothes and my boots and hands got caked with the batter.

“If I had knowed this, I'd have let Lance build his own road,” Mr. Howard said.

Mr. Lance come to inspect the landslide. He huffed and puffed up the hill from his buggy. “Richards,” he said, “you could have avoided this.”

“I can't stop the rain,” I said.

“You must have built it wrong,” he said. That made me so mad I couldn't get my breath for a few seconds. For he was right, something had been done wrong. All our work that summer had been wasted. I was so blind with anger I couldn't think of nothing to say.

“You ain't paid me a cent,” I said, as though I meant the bad luck happened because he hadn't paid me.

“And you won't get a cent until this mess is cleaned up and the road finished,” he said.

He walked off like I wasn't worth arguing with. He limped down the hill with his cane, swinging his fat frame from side to side. I was so mad I was shaking. I thought of pushing his face down in the mud and drowning him. I thought of him coughing and choking on mud and manure in the road. I seen myself pushing his face deeper in the manure and letting him smother on gobs of muck.

I couldn't work no more. I had to get away, and I walked above
the road and climbed into the wet woods. My boots was all caked with red clay that scraped off like turds on the leaves. I walked out through the wet underbrush, smearing and tracking the woods floor. Never had the green leaves looked so clean, and the bark of trees was pure as spice. The sticks and leaves on the ground looked scrubbed and polished. Water standing on leaves was clear as magnifying glasses.

When I turned back toward the road I climbed to the top of the high bank and looked down on the roadway. Shelves would have to be dug in the mountain above the cut. A steep bank would just slide away again when it rained. We would have to dig steps back into the mountain to make terraces.

The convicts worked like maggots in a carcass. They was dumping load after load over the edge of the cut and it spilled like pus down the mountainside. Everything was smeared and tore up. It seemed impossible this was the beautiful gap where we had started working a few months before. The whole mountain was filth and waste, like a wound festering and running its corruption down the slope. It made me mad all over again just to look at what we had done.

After about a week we had dug most of the roadbed out again. And by the time that was done, Noble and me had surveyed out a new line at the top of the cut and started them chopping trees and digging again. We dug out a flight of shelves in the mountain, to keep it from crumbling off into the gap. It was a bigger job than cutting the road in the first place.

“I didn't go to do no such extra work as this,” Mr. Howard said. He had the gangs dump the spoil on either side of the mountain, spreading the mess on the North Carolina side. Now it looked like the whole mountain had been tore out and gutted. It didn't even look like the gap anymore.

When the terraces was about half finished, it commenced to rain again. I woke up in the night and heard the drops on the cedar roof, and thought of all the fresh exposed dirt, and the shovels and mattocks and all the other tools rusting in the dark. I said to Noble, “Here we go again,” but he didn't wake up. He kept snoring and I listened to the rain. Eventually, when I got back to sleep, I dreamed about floundering around in the mud up to my armpits. But it was bright yellow mud, and sour like clots of clabber. The mountain was trying to drown me in its filth.

It kept raining for a week, as it will in summer once it starts, and the mountain broke loose again. The shelves we had cut melted and slumped away. The whole mess come sliding down into the cut, like brown sugar that had been wet. The roadway was filled again. It was like the mountain was laughing at me. It didn't want to be split by no road, and it was slapping my work out of the way. More trees and roots and rocks fell into the gap.

By the third week of rain, it looked like the mountain was trying to heal itself. The slides filled in and smoothed over the cut. Tiny weeds had started to grow on the fresh dirt. If we left it alone, briars and seedlings would take on the slides by the end of summer. In a few years, nobody would know the cut over the mountain had ever been made.

So, my dear, to round a long story off, it kept raining all through Dog Days into late summer. We dug the cut out three times, and every time the bank caved off and filled it again. And Mr. Howard threatened to take his gangs back to Greenville and leave the turnpike be. Mr. Lance would talk to him and then we would shovel the shelves wider and further back into the ridge. The bank was now fifty to sixty feet high in the gap.